Johnson has devilish win

FORT WORTH -- Jimmie Johnson was “fighting some demons,” he said, as he risked disaster in the Chase by battling side by side with Matt Kenseth for a win that could catapult Johnson ahead of Jeff Gordon in their fight for the Nextel Cup championship.

Johnson beat the demons, and Kenseth, and took the points lead from Gordon, because in the fateful moments of Sunday’s Dickies 500, he suddenly ceased to worry about wrecking.

“I was dirt-tracking the car [sliding sideways on pavement], and having fun, and was a free spirit of sorts,” he said.

For 3 1/2 laps of dicing with Kenseth, often side by side, sometimes with one or the other swerving precariously sideways, Johnson fought the demons: “Sometimes, I thought about stopping racing side by side.”

He thought of backing off, preserving his points position, and surrendering the win to Kenseth.

But the free spirit wouldn’t let that happen.

Johnson cleared Kenseth down the backstretch at Texas Motor Speedway with 2 1/2 laps to go, and sailed away to his third straight win, his ninth of the season, and a 30-point lead over Gordon with two races left in NASCAR’s playoffs.

This may have been the watershed in favor of Johnson’s second straight title, and against Gordon’s bid for a fifth championship.

Gordon fought an ill-handling car throughout the twi-night race, and wound up seventh. It was the second week in a row Johnson had won while Gordon struggled just to get a top-10 finish, and afterward the dejection was obvious in Gordon’s voice.

“Those guys are just out-performing us, that’s all there is to it,” Gordon said of Johnson’s branch of the Hendrick Motorsports team, which even shares the same building with Gordon’s branch.

“We’re just fighting too hard for these types of finishes,” Gordon said. “We need to be fighting that hard for a win. We just flat-out got beat today.”

Clint Bowyer, the only other driver who entered the race with any real hope of catching Johnson and Gordon in the points, finished 19th and fell 181 points behind Johnson.

“Now we have control of it, I guess,” Johnson said, but cautioned himself. “The last two weeks I’ve been able to gain 80-something points on Jeff [83, precisely], but in the next two weeks I could lose 80-something back to him.”

Gordon’s best hope is that next week’s race is at Phoenix, where he won in the spring. Neither driver has won at Homestead-Miami Speedway, site of the season finale Nov. 18.

Asked whether he felt badly for his close friend and mentor, Johnson sighed and replied happily, “No. This is racing. You check your emotions at the gate. Jeff’s a great friend, but he’s also the most challenging driver for me to beat out here. I have all the respect in the world for him. But I don’t feel bad for him.”

Kenseth, out of the running for the championship, didn’t feel badly for either of the Chase duelists.

In fact, “I tried in a way to take advantage of him [Johnson] and the situation,” Kenseth said. “I didn’t think, ‘There’s the guy leading the points; I’m gonna give him a bunch of room.’ I was like, ‘Man, I’m gonna race the heck out of him and crowd him, and maybe he’ll back out of there and think better, think I’d better back out of it before I get myself in a bad spot.’ ”

Kenseth had taken the lead after taking only two tires during the final caution, with 34 laps left, while Johnson took four and had to work his way through traffic to run down Kenseth.

“He had a much faster car,” Kenseth said, and added that his only hope of winning was that Johnson’s big-picture concerns about the championship might make him cautious enough not to press the issue.

With four laps to go, Kenseth’s Ford swerved sideways, right alongside Johnson’s Chevrolet, coming off Turn 4.

“I just about spun out, and that would have been bad,” Kenseth said. “I was looking at his right-rear quarter panel, and that would have been really bad for him, and really bad for me. So I’m glad I was able to gather it up and keep rolling.”

Kenseth figured Johnson knew “I wasn’t going to do anything crazy, but I certainly didn’t give him a lot of room.”

Ed Hinton covers motor racing for Tribune Co. newspapers.